Tip: serve local files over HTTP with one console command

This weekend I was playing with Facebook’s JavaScript SDK and I needed a quick way to serve over HTTP the files I was working on, so that I could access them in a browser window at http://localhost.

I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up Apache on my Mac, though, and I was looking for some quick alternative to installing a local web server. After some Googling, I found a wonderful one liner that did the job, provided that you have Python installed.

Open a Terminal window and go to the directory containing the files you want to serve and run:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

or, if you are using Python 3,

python -m http.server

you will then be able to access your files on http://localhost:8000/. (You can specify a different port number by passing the number as last argument, just remember that you need root permissions to open sockets on ports lower than 1024.)